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Monday, April 6, 2015

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The World's Most Powerful Atom Smasher Restarts With a Big Bang

The world's most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, which provides a window into the universe just milliseconds after the Big Bang, came back to life this morning, after more than two years of maintenance and upgrade work, and it's stronger than ever. Then at 12:27 p.m. Geneva time, another proton beam trekked around the ring in the opposite direction, officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) reported today (April 5). In the first run of the restart, the LHC hit energies of 450 GeV, where one GeV is equivalent to the mass of a proton. In the coming days, LHC operators plan to amp up the energy of the proton beams to the highest ever achieved.

Breast Milk Sold Online May Not Be 100% Human Milk

Buying breast milk online in order to nourish a baby with important nutrients that are not available from formula may not always be the safest choice, a new study suggests. Researchers found that one in 10 samples of breast milk that they bought over the Internet and tested contained genetic material from cow's milk. They said it was likely that the cow's milk was intentionally added to human milk, to stretch its volume. Giving babies breast milk that contains even small quantities of cow's milk could be harmful because some infants may have problems tolerating cow's milk, or they might have an allergy to cow's milk protein.

Huge Colorado Floods Helped Sculpt Mountains

In 2013, heavy rains unleashed devastating slurries of rock, soil and water on cities and towns along the Colorado Rockies. "While it strikes us as very random, our research suggests this is one of the formative processes in this landscape," said lead study author Scott Anderson, a geomorphologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tacoma, Washington. The 2013 Colorado floods triggered more than 1,100 landslides and debris flows in the Front Range after several days of unusually heavy rain in September. The resulting debris flows carried huge volumes of rock and sediment down mountain valleys, scouring out river channels like sandpaper.

Junk Food Is Making NYC Ants More Like Humans

If you were in New York City recently and you saw a man sucking stuff off of the sidewalk with a weird contraption that resembled a water bong, you may have inadvertently witnessed serious biological fieldwork in action. To study the diet of urban ants, Clint Penick, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, went to Broadway, aspirator in hand, to collect specimens. "Nobody ever talked to me," Penick said.

Here Be Dragons: 3 Spiky Lizard Species Found in Andes

The three new species were found in the cloud forests of Peru and Ecuador, an international research team reported today (April 6) in the journal ZooKeys. The team, led by Omar Torres-Carvajal of the Museo de Zoología QCAZ in Ecuador, also ferreted out the five other woodlizard species recorded in recent years.

Zap! New Map Charts Every Lightning Bolt

"It's taking very rapid updates," said Daniel Cecil, a member of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center's lightning team. Roughly 90 percent of the lightning strikes on Earth occur between the 38th parallel south and 38th parallel north latitudes, said Cecil. But even on equatorial land, lightning strikes vary with different types of thunderstorms. The number of lightning strikes per storm, however, is relatively low, with only a few flashes per minute, Cecil said.

Ghostly Faces and Invisible Verse Found in Medieval Text

"It's easy to think we know all we can know about a manuscript like the 'Black Book,' but to see these ghosts from the past brought back to life in front of our eyes has been incredibly exciting," Myriah Williams, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. In 1904, Sir John Williams, the founder of the National Library of Wales, bought the book, which measures 6.7 by 5 inches (17 by 12.5 centimeters). Only recently did Myriah Williams and Paul Russell, a professor at Cambridge's department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC), examine the pages of the book.

Pluto Weather Forecast: Probe Likely to Find It Gusty and Gassy

Wondering how the space weather will be around Pluto this summer? Scientists working with NASA's New Horizons mission are predicting gusts of charged particles with speeds up to 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h) that will slow as they interact with the dwarf planet's atmosphere. New Horizons, which will make a highly anticipated flyby of Pluto on July 14, has already been sampling the space weather environment in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. "Results from those measurements are being radioed to the ground, and our team is already learning new things about the distant environment near Pluto's orbit, 3 billion miles [4.8 billion kilometers] from Earth," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, said in a statement.

Want to Live Longer? Optimal Amount of Exercise Revealed

Doing a few hours of exercise every week will probably help you live longer, but doing a whole lot more exercise doesn't provide much extra benefit, according to a new study on physical activity and longevity. Still, doing as much as 10 times the recommended amount of exercise was not linked with an increased risk of dying during the study period. In the study, researchers analyzed information from more than 660,000 people ages 21 to 98 in the United States and Sweden who answered questions about how much time they spent doing physical activity, including walking, running, swimming and bicycling. People who got some exercise, but not enough to meet the physical activity recommendations were still 20 percent less likely to die over a 14-year period than those who did not do any physical activity.

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Sunday, April 5, 2015

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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'Big Bang' particle collider restarts after refit: CERN

ZURICH/GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's nuclear research center CERN said on Sunday they had restarted their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) "Big Bang" machine after a two-year refit, launching a new bid to resolve some of the mysteries of the universe. In a live blog covering the restart, CERN said one of the two beams had completed the circuit of the LHC. The LHC had been shut down for two years for a refit of its machinery and wiring. Any new discoveries it makes are unlikely to emerge until mid-2016. (Reporting by Joshua Franklin and Robert Evans; editing by John Stonestreet)

CERN restarts 'Big Bang' collider after two-year refit

ZURICH/GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's particle physics research centre CERN on Sunday restarted their "Big Bang" Large Hadron Collider (LHC), embarking on a new bid to resolve some mysteries of the universe and look for "dark matter". Hopes for the second run lie in breaking out of what is known as the Standard Model of how the universe works at the level of elementary particles, and into "New Physics".

CERN restarts "Big Bang" collider after two-year refit

How Easter Helped Bring Down a Medical Myth About Ulcers

Some people will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Some scientists, meanwhile, will celebrate the birthday of the humble bacterium Helicobacter pylori. H. pylori infects more than half of the world's population. Many people who carry the bacterium won't ever experience any symptoms of the infection, but it's the culprit behind most ulcers and many cases of stomach cancer — and it hid, unidentified, inside human stomachs for thousands of years.

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Saturday, April 4, 2015

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World Will Get More Religious by 2050

The world is becoming more religious, as the number of agnostics and others who don't affiliate with a certain religion shrinks as a percentage of the global population. By 2050, just 13 percent of people in the world will say they are unaffiliated, compared with 16 percent who said the same in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Group survey. The United States is an exception, where more Americans are expected to flee organized religion. Islam will grow faster than any other major religion, and at a higher rate than the world population balloons, the survey found.

Shortest Total Lunar Eclipse of the Century Visible Early Saturday

Don't forget to look skyward in the early hours of Saturday morning (April 4), to catch a glimpse of the shortest total lunar eclipse of the century. The moon will be completely swallowed by Earth's shadow for just 4 minutes and 43 seconds on Saturday morning, according to NASA officials. The total eclipse begins at 6:16 a.m. EDT (1016 GMT). "For early humans, [a lunar eclipse] was a time when they were concerned that life might end, because the moon became blood red and the light that the moon provided at night might have been taken away permanently," Mitzi Adams, an astronomer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said during a news conference today (April 3).

Easter Science: 5 Odd Facts About Eggs

For instance, kiwi eggs take up about 25 percent of the mother's body, making it the largest egg of any bird, relative to its mother's body size, according to researchers at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. "If you try to push one of those eggs, because it's so heavy at one end, it will actually spin in a circle," said Paul Sweet, the ornithology collection manager at AMNH. Eggshells are largely made of calcium carbonate, which looks white to the human eye, according to "The Book of Eggs" (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

2011 Japan Tsunami Unleashed Ozone-Destroying Chemicals

The 2011 tsunami that struck Japan released thousands of tons of ozone-destroying chemicals and greenhouse gases into the air, a new study shows. The damaged insulation, refrigerators, air conditioners and electrical equipment unleashed 7,275 tons (6,600 metric tons) of halocarbons, the study reported. Halocarbon emissions rose by 91 percent over typical levels in the year following the earthquake, said Takuya Saito, lead study author and senior researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan. The six halocarbons measured in the study are a group of chemicals that attack the Earth's protective ozone layer and can also contribute to global warming.

Amped-Up Atom Smasher Will Restart This Weekend

It's a great day for particle physics fans: The world's largest atom smasher has been cleared to start running again as early as this weekend. After a two-year hiatus, researchers and engineers planned to restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last week, but an electrical short delayed the process. Scientists quickly found the glitch: a small piece of metal lodged in the wiring of one of the LHC's powerful electromagnets. "It's a bit like deliberately blowing a fuse," Paul Collier, head of beams at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which manages the LHC, told Nature News.

Bizarre Syndrome Makes Visitors to Jerusalem Go Crazy

As Christians and Jews around the world prepare to celebrate the holidays of Easter and Passover, many will flock to the city of Jerusalem. Some psychiatrists have dubbed this condition "Jerusalem syndrome," and say it happens in people who have no prior history of mental illness. "I'd never heard of it before," admitted Simon Rego, director of psychology training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. Jerusalem syndrome was first identified in 2000.

For Some Kids, Easter Egg Hunts Pose Allergy Risk

Several children in Florida experienced allergic reactions after they secretly ate chocolate during an Easter egg hunt, without their parents realizing it, according to a new report of the cases. The four children — two boys and two girls, ages 4 to 7 years old — had all previously been diagnosed with a nickel allergy, a condition in which people experience skin rashes when they come in contact with the metal. In each child's case, their symptoms had improved for two to five months, but then they all wound up at the doctor with flare-ups about two to five days after that year's Easter Sunday. "They all came in on the same two-day period," said Dr. Sharon Jacob, a dermatologist who treated the children at the University of Miami.

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